The best way I can find to describe what’s been going on recently is that the perfectly natural thirst for revolution can’t find an appropriate outlet. There’s a lot of anger and frustration out there and it’s looking for a home.

Some of this hunger for revolution is normal, stage-of-life, developmental anger among those making the transition from immaturity to maturity. The need to change the world never changes, nor does our belief – before reality hits and we discover just how ordinary we all are – that our revolutionary zeal is unique and unparalleled in the history of humankind. It’s the reason why so many new entrants to adulthood haven’t yet realised that Che Guevara posters were a cliché already 40 years ago.

But some of that anger and frustration are stage-of-life of another kind entirely. They are caused by the doubts and confusion that begin to set in sometime around our late 30s, when we suddenly realise that our future is rapidly becoming our past, that things have not turned out quite the way we had in mind, and that this isn’t really what we want to be doing for the rest of our lives but we don’t know how to go about changing that.

This creeping doubt and insecurity then turn into a full-blown midlife crisis when marriages break down and futile attempts are made to recapture youth. But there is no Maltese template for having a relationship in a post-marital context, which is devoid of the only motivation known previously: that which comes from starting out in life together and building a home and family. Without that motivation, and with no other framework, pattern or example, a lot of post-marital relationships remain shallow and unsatisfactory, contributing to the mounting despair of the people involved in them, rather than staving off existential misery.

You know that there’s a hunger for revolution, but no appropriate home for all that pent-up emotional energy and indignation, when students − who in various other contexts would have demonstrated against war, the draft, racism, racial segregation, the imprisonment of writers, human rights violations, or even just spending cuts or sharp increases in their tuition fees − end up fussing about buses like pensioners.

I think if I were 18, or 19, or 20, I would be embarrassed to raise hell about the bus service, no matter how difficult it makes my life. The cause somehow lacks the necessary glamour. Let’s just say that I don’t think I’d be moved enough to get myself arrested and detained in excrement-smeared pitch-darkness by Anglu Farrugia over waiting-times at bus-stops.

But things were a lot rougher then, so comparisons are out of order. To the current crop of 19-year-olds, the bus service probably seems like the greatest insult to their dignity as human beings, because the reality is that they don’t have much else to get upset about, and everything is sorted out and paid for.

Another thing that’s different now is that 19-year-olds don’t appear to feel the need to be cool about everything, except for obvious provocations like gross violations of human rights. From what I see, getting hot under the collar about anything and everything, like those aforementioned pensioners, is the new cool. I find this fascinating, because it’s just so different.

Even though we used the bus to get around, it took us three hours to get somewhere and back, and all buses stopped operating at 9pm except for those to Sliema (which ran until 11pm because of the wild tourists who stayed out late), we behaved as though we were miraculously teleported to our destination from our point of departure, arriving cool and relaxed – to quote a former prime minister – despite feeling hot and harried and having just released inwardly a string of expletives at the time it took us to get there.

We would have never dreamt of turning up somewhere looking hassled and going on about how long it took us to get there by bus, and which routes we took and didn’t take. We would have been acutely conscious of sounding just like our mothers, and that would have spelt instant social pariah status as the nerd from hell.

It’s the same with their parents’ generation, which is my generation now, but this for midlife crisis reasons rather than start-of-life angst. To listen to my contemporaries talk (and talk and talk), you’d think they spend the day getting around by bus, that buses are a huge part of their life, and that they have shares in Arriva and are concerned about potential damage to their value. The way they bang on, you’d imagine that Malta is a place where 90 per cent of the population is dependent on buses, and not where the number of cars is roughly the same size as the number of people old enough to drive.

More and more, lately, after listening to conversations and reading newspapers and the internet, I am left with the feeling not so much that people are angry about this or angry about tZhat, but that they are angry, full stop, that the real source of their anger is personal disquiet. What seems outwardly to be the reason for their disproportionate rage – the buses, for instance, or the infamous ‘we need a change’ – is really just the target for anger that would otherwise be unfocused. I’ve come to the conclusion that when people say ‘we need a change’ and believe they are referring to the government, they are projecting onto the public sphere the private and personal disquiet they feel at the dawning realisation that they need to make serious changes in their own lives before it’s too late.

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